VHDRI Skies: Magic Hours

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Image Courtesy Archangel Visual

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High Dynamic Range Skies
VHDRI Skies are designed specifically to help you create super realistic lighting for your 3D scenes, with accurate reflections and a dynamic backgrounds that react realistically with all manner of different surfaces, such as semi-opaque surfaces like tinted glass, or atmospheric effects such as dust, smoke and haze. Each VHDRI Sky is engineered with the highest dynamic range available today, ranging from extremely under exposed to over exposed, allowing artists to choose precisely the exposure or "shutter speed" required.

Quality
Our VHDRI skies use only the highest quality digital optics - we don't use mirror balls or distorted, low quality fish eye lenses. Due to the huge resolutions achieved, these images are amongst the only HDRIs available that can be used for background images and reflections as well as high performance lighting. They provide maximum flexibility for your virtual camera and scene, allowing long zooms and extreme detail in reflection close-ups.

VHDRI Advantages
Using Hyperfocal's hemispherical VHDRI skies has advantages over using full spherical environments, which can include unwanted trees, buildings & other objects. Hyperfocal's VHDRI skies can be used in any scene, and once set as a background or environment, they will create super realistic lighting and accurate, bright contrasting reflections and highlights.

Super High Resolution VHDRI Skies
Designed specifically for use in projects requiring very high resolution and super realistic lighting.

- 14,000 X 7,000 HDRI (in exr and hdr)
- 14,000 X 7,000 LDR (jpg)
- 4096 X 1024 HDRI (exr and hdr)
- 512 X 256 Lighting HDRI (exr and hdr)

"The sunset HDRIs are simply gorgeous, I now use the HDRIs on all my architectural viz stuff. It makes the lighting so much more simple!" - Matt Lester, 3DViz

Usage

Sky backgrounds: When used as a background, VHDRI skies allow for dynamic, changeable exposure with enough resolution to allow long camera zooms and top quality prints. HDR backgrounds react realistically when viewing through tinted glass, smoke, fog and all manner of environmental conditions. Or convert to an LDR image such as tiff or jpg and choose exactly the exposure level you require.

VHDR images have such high bit depth and are so editable that you can heavily alter the original VHDRI sky with minimal quality loss. Create moody, colourized, contrasty skies with no fear of grain or banding artifacts.

Photography: VHDRI skies are much more flexible than ordinary LDR skies. Simulate whichever shutter speed you require for your sky replacement - blown out and overexposed, or greatly underexposed for silhouettes.

Lighting: If your software supports it, use the VHDRI at full size for maximum sharpness in your shadows. Or down size/blur to any level you require. VHDRI lighting provides accurate color representation that matches the sky image for super realism.

Reflections: If you're working to a high resolution output, high resolution VHDRI skies are for you. Lose the flat look that low dynamic range reflections produce, and see how much realism and contrast your reflections achieve with our industry leading VHDR skies.

Time of Day and Weather Conditions
VHDRI Skies feature a variety of time and weather conditions, including twilight and sunsets, cloudy and stormy skies. Each sky is named according to the time and weather condition.

Choose Your Exposure Level
You don't even need to be using VHDRI lighting to benefit from Hyperfocal's VHDRI skies - one of the drawbacks to traditional sky textures is that you are limited to the low dynamic range of the single exposure level provided. VHDRI sky textures allow you to perfectly match the exposure level and mood of your 3d scene.

Hyperfocal Resources
Check out our resources and stay tuned as Hyperfocal adds loads of content including tutorials and reviews covering all the major 3d software applications.

Compatibility
Hyperfocal design's VHDRI Skies are compatible with any application on PC or Mac that supports .hdr or .exr files. This includes all major 2d and 3d applications such as HDRShop, CS2, 3dsmax, Lightwave, Softimage and so on.

System Requirements
- High Resolution Skies: The 14,000X7,000 skies are taxing on older systems and software. Some software applications also feature memory and texture size limits that may cause problems when using the full size skies. We recommend that owners of systems with processors slower than 2.6ghz with 768 RAM size down the full resolution skies.
- HDRShop: Please note that HDRShop has some problems working with the large sky VHDRIs on slower machines. Operations on VHDRIs at 10kX5k in HDRShop can require up to 1.2 gigs of RAM, and since windows can take half the available memory, you may need at least 2gigs of RAM.
- Photoshop CS(x): No known problems loading or editing any size VHDRI (resize using bi-linear filtering).

Available at the Hyperfocal Store!

VHDRI Tutorials
Follow the tutorials supplied below for help using your Hyperfocal Sky VHDRIs in any of the following 3d programs.

Vray: Paco Morales teams up with Hyperfocal Design and Vismasters to bring you this tutorial
3dsmax & Brazil: A HDRI tutorial by Gabriele Protti.
Cinema 4D: From Maxon
Lightwave: Hyperfocal Design's tutorial, "HDRI in Lightwave"
Maya/Mental Ray: Wiki Tutorial
Modo: Mov file from Luxology (we suggest you right click -> save as)